William S. Rogers has received recognition for excellence in creativity and craftsmanship from Tennessee and Virginia. In 1986 he was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship by the Tennessee Arts Commission in his native state of Tennessee and, in 2002, was named a master craftsman in Virginia. As one of eight master teachers selected from throughout the Commonwealth by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, he participated in a statewide apprenticeship program in which his skills were passed down to an aspiring young smith.
William S. Rogers Metals is a design studio that provides educational, consultation, and restoration services to museums, schools and the public. As a professional smith, his work uses traditional tools and techniques of the blacksmith, silversmith, and coppersmith to create contemporary designs that provide personal interaction for his clients for generations.
William S. Rogers
William S. Rogers Metals
452 Suntrace Circle
Cullowhee NC 28723
828-293-3777
Mr. Rogers is a member of the
Southern Highlands Crafts Guild
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Living in Tennessee until the mid-1980s, Rogers moved to Virginia where he operated William S. Rogers Metals, a design and fabrication company specializing in ironwork incorporating copper and other non-ferrous metals. He maintained an active teaching schedule, teaching annually at regional craft schools and, for three years, taught art at Blacksburg High School, named one of the top 100 high schools in the US. During the 1990s, Rogers was selected to participate in statewide Artists-in-Education programs by both the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
 In 2000, Rogers taught a metal sculpture class at the University of Panama, using his sketchbook as a communication tool. He consulted with the West Virginia Children’s Museum in Beckley to improve their smithy and train their resident blacksmith to demonstrate at the museum and completed a restoration of the historic fencing and gates at the Reynolds Homestead in Critz, Virginia. He is an exhibiting member of the Southern Highland Craft Guild and is represented on the HandMade in America Craft Registry.
Since 2005, William Rogers has been a resident of North Carolina; he has moved his studio to Cullowhee, a small community west of Asheville. He planned and developed the blacksmithing studio for the Jackson County Green Energy Park, adapting a natural gas forge to burn methane. The studio will function as a community center for crafts and a business incubator for smiths utilizing forges fueled by gas recovered from a former landfill site to keep in the tradition of smithing being in the forefront of technology. |
Jackson County